The Digital Age: is Journalism Changing?

Social media is impacting the way we read and write news, but at what cost?

Due to social media, sources are more readily available for use for journalists. However, this means that these sources come from the public and are often fake or unconfirmed. This means that journalists have to go that extra step to confirm the news with the person who owns the media or information before releasing it to their audience. This often leads to journalists taking the route of “Churnalism” where they just produce massive amounts of news that are copied and pasted without going through the effort of creating and checking the news themselves.

As a journalist you also need to keep in mind which social media platform you are writing for, because there are many different ways in which each social media presents information. For example, the popular social media app Snapchat uses mainly images and videos to presents its news, so the journalists need to be mindful of their news stories having media to go along with it. Similarly, Twitter also has very specific requirements for how information can be presented which are tweets 140 characters or less, so often times journalists or news outlets will simply post links to their website.